Leslie Scalapino, 1944 – 2010

Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California.

An experimental writer associated with the West Coast Language poets, Leslie Scalapino attended Reed College and received an MA in English from the University of California at Berkeley. Scalapino’s writing often blurs the distinctions between poetry, prose, and even the visual arts—her book Crowd and not evening or light (1992) includes photographs with handwritten notes. Her collections include Considering how exaggerated music is (1982), that they were at the beach-aeolotropic series (1985), and the trilogy The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion (1991). (From PoetryFoundation.org)

PennSound currently has a moving in memorium message on their front page, with links to other resource pages on her, including their own author page. There is also a tribute page up on epc.buffalo.edu.

KSW has a sound recording from a reading she did in 1995, introduced by Colin Smith. She read from from New Time (Wesleyan 1999), and from her novel Defoe (Green Integer 2002).